Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Blog Meets Twitter Meets Letter Makes Better?

Making a new work for the Biennale de Montréal opening on May 1st.

As I told the curator, it's great just to be in the same sentence as Sophie Calle.

The exhibition theme is "Elements of Chance" and draws its inspiration from Mallarmé who, it must be said, I am always drawing renewable energy from.

A nice overview of the exhibition can be found in the Montréal Gazette.

The Denver Post blurbed Immobilité in the context of Sundance. Maybe I should have submitted it to the Sundance "New Frontiers" program? Oh well, there's still time to crash that scene too.

Crashing scenes. Making scenes. Circulating within and (when necessary) without scenes. That's what I attempt to model as an artist-in-residence at The University of Colorado.

Strange that I would refer to myself as "an artist-in-residence at The University of Colorado" given that I'm a tenured Full Professor. But that's what it feels like.

One of my prints from the Subtitled series produced in conjunction with Art & Culture Editions is showing at the CU Faculty show next door to the Visual Arts Complex on the University of Colorado campus where my huge studio is located. Not bad for "an artist-in-residence."

Danielle, my editor at the University of Minnesota Press, emails to tell me it's time to make some suggestions for the cover of remixthebook. The first idea that pops into my mind is a kind of Beatle's White album where remixthebook is barely visible in the white cover impression. A kind of Malevich white on white with slightly raised lettering in book type.

That brings me back to Mallarmé and his blank white page.

But how does the blank white page, which haunted Beckett too in homage to Mallarmé, as well as Godard, relate to remix, to the Source Material Everywhere?

"Faced with the invisible," Godard once said, "with Mallarmé's blank page, I find myself seeking the corner of memory."

This must have something to do with where the source of creativity emerges from.

But don't ask me. Ask John Simon.

Is it as obvious to you as it is to me that my blog posts are now totally contaminated by Twitter?

That's totally fucked up, but that's the way it's been going these last few weeks (my pleasure).

As I wrote in a recent letter to a legendary computer artist from the Stuttgart group circa 1965 and who is now in his 70s:
I am nothing now but a sequence of pixelated purposelessness, strangely engaged with the semiotic machine, producing what Flusser might have called "acts of ritual magic" while playing the computer keyboard. But the keyboard is just a typewriter. It's a QWERTY instrument that I do not even know how to play, at least not traditionally, so that I hunt and peck for keys, but I do it as if my eyes were closed, since it all happens as part of an incredibly fast, unconsciously generated interactive performance between me (or not-me, the flowing thing that becomes something like a semiotic animal) and the machine (which ironically feels more human to me than ever, I think, because I am learning from my digitally networked and mobile-addicted students how to transform aesthetic practice into aesthetically felt performance with emerging info-prosthetics). Aesthetic prosthetics, semiotic animals, semiotic machines, and the potential of sensuous computing. Processing life without computers is no longer possible. The good news is that we can intersubjectively (socially) mash-up personas, feelings, practices, and pleasures into the ongoing scene of desire ... the bad news is that the older I get, the less literate I become. Now I have to ask my assistants, younger colleagues, and advanced students to help me realize the semiotic impulse so that we can then feed them back into the field of distribution.
It was a long letter. The anti-Twitter.


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Monday, January 24, 2011

VOICE ... Vocal Aesthetics

Here's a link to VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media
Edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen and published by MIT Press.

According to the site, "Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural forces that shape it. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics from history, philosophy, cultural theory, film, dance, poetry, media arts, and computer games [...] Chapters cover such technologies as voice mail, podcasting, and digital approximations of the human voice. A number of authors explore the performance, performativity, and authenticity (or 'authenticity effect') of voice in dance, poetry, film, and media arts; while others examine more immaterial concerns—the voice's often-invoked magical powers, the ghostliness of disembodied voices, and posthuman vocalization."

Besides myself, contributors include Isabelle Arvers, Giselle Beiguelman, Philip Brophy, Ross Gibson, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Levin, Helen Macallan, Virginia Madsen, Meredith Morse, Norie Neumark, Andrew Plain, John Potts, Theresa M. Senft, Nermin Saybasili, Amanda Stewart, Axel Stockburger, Michael Taussig, Martin Thomas, Theo Van Leeuwen, and Mark Ward.

Rhizome recently reviewed it here.

And, as always, Paule at effetdepresence is on it too (in French).


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